Re-cycle is a Polish short animated film about a man in a post-apocalyptic world of darkness and howling wind, who cycles relentlessly on his bike to charge up what little power he can to run the radio playing his dead wife’s voice singing. Grim as fuck. With no dialogue, it manages to tell a full…
I have no faith, but I was greeting within the first 5 minutes of this film. With all the films I’ve watched lately, where difference is a divide, difference is a source of conflict, it moved me to tears to watch a film where difference is neighbourhood, difference is valued, difference makes us all richer.…
God, this made me wanna learn how to play the piano. My dad used to say, when you see someone play an instrument, it’s like they can make magic in their hands. It’s very true, and it never seems to get old. Tuning is the kind of documentary I love, one that invites you sit,…
This is a wonderful and warm film about Irene, a 16-year-old girl, bursting with life, who is practicing for her audition to get into drama college. A Radiant Girl follows her as she annoys her brother, has her first crush, shares her secrets with her grandma, and embarks on the journey into the bright world…
This is such a Sunday afternoon movie. Lying on your granny’s carpet listening to her tell you what everyone on screen died of. Summer Light reminds me of nothing so much as an episode of Frasier. There’s everyone chasing each other, a ludicrous and precarious party, and disaster always looming. While ostensibly a romantic drama,…
Thou Shalt Not Hate is about an Italian doctor, son of a Holocaust survivor, whose path crosses with a family of neo-Nazis. It is a film about how we deal with the inheritance of hate, and what we might be willing to sacrifice to see the cycle end. Simone is a dashing, middle-aged doctor, who…
Overlong and tedious film. It focuses on France de Meurs, a tv personality who starts taking crying jags. France is a rich, privileged, white woman who has everything, but is still somehow sad. It’s the Anna Karenina conundrum. And I give zero fucks. There is barely the wisp of a plot to this. Whole scenes…
Set almost entirely within an A&E on a night of Yellow Vest protests, The Divide follows the collision of a number of characters as tensions run high. Reminiscent of something like Clash, the political situation in France is boiled down to this one place. There are four main characters, a lesbian couple on the verge…
Lingui, meaning The Sacred Bonds, is a film about a woman seeking an abortion for her daughter in Chad where it is illegal. A real feminist film about throwing off what’s been handed down from on high as the misogynistic status quo, and prioritising women’s wellbeing and relationships. Amina is a devout Muslim, going to…
Hello World is a beautiful little children’s film, mixing paper mache stop-gap animation with a traditional 2D animation, to bring to life the wildlife of a forest pond. Each animal starts off being born and discovering the world, the beaver, the pike, the dragonfly, the salamander, the owl, the bittern, the tortoise, the kingfisher, the…